


I Forgot to Remember (to try and forget)

by blackjacq (Annabeelee)



Category: Invader Zim
Genre: Ambiguity, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Codependency, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Memory Loss, Non-Explicit Sex, Obsessive Behavior, POV Second Person, Repressed Memories, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:48:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25735291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annabeelee/pseuds/blackjacq
Summary: You stare into the empty lot but there’s no house here, hasn’t been for months, maybe years. You try to remember why you came here, but can’t. There are gaps in your memory; gaps that this absent house might fit into. You feel like you're in mourning but for who, you may never know for sure.Dib is 13 when he realizes something is wrong. There's someone missing, but he can't figure out who.
Relationships: Dib/Zim (Invader Zim)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 86





	I Forgot to Remember (to try and forget)

**Author's Note:**

> What is this fic? I have no idea, but after I saw some art about Dib forgetting who Zim was, I got this idea stuck in my craw so now you have to deal with it. Yes, you. Enjoy. Unbeta’d.

You’re 13 when you first notice something is off. 

Everything is in its place. Nothing has changed. You have a dad, a sister, a house. No new furniture in the house, no new buildings in the parts of the city you frequent, no new school for you to hate, no new job for your father.

It all feels odd though. Like the house suddenly tilted at a single degree, not enough to shove the couch out of place or toss dishes from cupboards, not enough to even point out, but just there for you to notice. Or like a spoon has gone missing and you finally realize that there’s something wrong with the silverware drawer every time you open it to grab a utensil.

Something like that.

Gaz is sitting on the couch, tapping aggressively on her Game Slave. Nothing strange there. It’s the most normal thing in the world and yet...

You remember her not looking at you as you closed the door, as if in a daze, blinking rapidly. It’s here you don’t recall what happened before you stepped over the threshold, just that you are entering the house, now. The sun is setting, time has passed, you must have exited the house at some point, but the last thing you recall as your shoes hit the doormat is the lingering taste of too much garlic on your baked chicken dinner. 

Three months ago.

“He left.” Gaz says, almost nonchalantly as the you bolt the lock. There’s a careful nuance to her voice, as if she expects some for of backlash. It takes you a while to really notice this.

You ask who absentmindedly, rolling your tongue in your mouth as you try to place the times in between a garlicky meal and now, and the gaming device drops to the carpet. You tense, immediately distracted and on guard as your sister slowly turns to stare bewildered at you over her shoulder. Something tugs in you, but it leaves just as it makes its presence known. You sister is generally abstinent in her emotions, save for maybe anger, but in that moment, you can recall with astonishing clarity the disbelief written in every line of her posture. 

“Yo-” The pinch in her brow loosens as a thousand battling emotions appear and disappear in the blink of an eye. She picks up her Game Slave from the floor, and settles back into the couch, though there’s a tension to her shoulders that betrays a discomfort. “Forget it.”

You don’t forget. You can’t because those two words reverberate between your ears, gaining momentum with each step taken towards your room. He left. He left. _He left. He left._ **_He-_ **

Who? 

You ask yourself that several times in the following days, weeks, as summer grows to its most fetid and sticky point that even the temperature drop of the sun hiding away for the evening cannot save. You spend most of it in front of the television, in the air conditioning next to Gaz who ignores you for most of it. Its comfortable, normal, but if you let your mind wander from the flashing images and barely coherent melodrama of daytime TV, there’s something distinctly, unquestioningly-

Missing. 

You take a bike across town to another neighborhood that you both know you’ve never been to. You also know the exact turns, the exact houses, the exact people who live here. It's instinct, unconscious, as you avoid potholes and awkward bumps without a thought and you find yourself stopping in front of an empty plot between two uninteresting houses in the exact same manner.

A muscle memory. 

You don’t know what you expected to find, because there’s nothing here but overgrown weeds in a space that seems impossibly large and depressingly barren. The absence of a house you can’t recall stifles you, weighs on you. You can’t breathe as you take in the emptiness, as your heart squeezes at the sight. Someone should be here, but you don’t know who. 

It buzzes, liquid, vibrating just out of the periphery of thought. A well-oiled object, slippery enough to evade the capture of your mind every time you try snatch at it. The longer you stare into the empty lot, the more desperate your brain gets to drum up something, anything, yet the images, the sounds, the very thing you know you should know just doesn’t surface.

It's nostalgic. It’s infuriating. Its-

 _He left_.

Who. Left.

You step into the weeds, ignoring how they swipe at your ankles, their drying sides biting your skin. You’re aware you’ve been here before, maybe in a dream, maybe for real, but this lot is familiar even as you catch on knotted weeds. You kick some grass, straining your vision through them to see if they’re hiding anything, but there’s nothing but dirt beneath your feet. 

Your head hurts. Has been since you stopped here, but as you pick through, it gets sharper and that memory gets even more slippery. You pinch your brow, the stabbing beginning to drown out every other thought in your head. Something wants to breach, swimming just below your cognition, sliding under the water tension of your mind, teasing to show itself yet never doing so even as you reach out to grab it. 

You trip. 

It distracts from the headache, skinning your knee on a rock and falling over something lumpy. A cutesy rubber pig, cracked from age and hardened to the elements stares at you from the grass with dirtied giant eyes. Picking it up, you feel nothing in particular save for the grubby unpleasant surface of the toy under your fingertips. You take it with you anyways.

It’s a sadness that overwhelms you as you hide the toy in your closet, a deep emptiness that threatens to collapse you to the floor. You’re grieving, but for who...

You can’t recall.

* * *

(You keep having dreams. Nightmares. Vague images of places untold, someone offering you a hand you desperately want to take but always fail to, and you wake as though though lit aflame. Panting. Sweating. Ready to run screaming. Something itching at the back of your head to remember it yet your bare walls offer nothing. Sometimes you shout when you wake and your dad appears in your doorway, offering not comfort but a cold concern as he assures you none of it is real. Some part of you knows he’s wrong, but as you hug your knees, rocking back and forth, you can’t say for sure.)

* * *

You’re 14 and you hate your classmates, but that feeling is mutual.

They say you’re a freak, call you worse names, ostracize, antagonize, make every day a living hell. Sometimes you wonder if its because of what you used to be like, all the weird shit you used to obsess over, but that was a while ago, and this is now, right now, as a guy shove you into a locker as he passes by. You've got no friends, no one to help take the heat, and no one offers you even a modicum of sympathy as teachers and staff alike turn the other cheek.

Even as things get more physical.

Some kids push you around. A few beat the shit out of you when they think no one’s looking. You fight back when the boys don’t get the jump on you, but you're no match for more than one. It bothers you, not so much than you're being bullied; that feels normal. Instead it's like you should be fighting someone else. There's someone more worthy of your time, your energy-

Someone else you should be stopping.

Your dad catches you gathering strange objects together. Weapons of varying degrees of lethality, tech for tracking moving targets, things that bind or otherwise trap people… You’ve been doing this for weeks now, as if in a trance, mindlessly ordering and gathering without much thought outside of ‘oh, I need this’. 

“What are we preparing all this for, son?” The eyebrow cast into your dad’s nonexistent hairline should have tipped you off, but you were too busy snapping together what is essentially an overpriced beartrap to notice. 

You tell your dad it's ‘in case he comes back’ absentmindedly. It’s muttered, barely a thought given to it; merely words ejaculated from your mouth reflexively from some part of your mind you pay no attention to. You're too focused, too lost in the familiarity of your task.

“In case who comes back?” 

The tools and the trap clatter to your floor, fingers folding tightly into your palm as the trance you’ve been in shatters. You considered that, didn't you? You thought about this, right? You take in your room; the boxes, the traps, the sharp objects...

Who are they for? Even as you look at your now empty fingers, you try to remember _why_ this is familiar, _why_ you even bought these things.

“Who’s coming back, Dib?” Your father’s voice is calm. Your head starts to hurt. You think you might be sick as you press your blunt nails hard enough to cut the skin of your palm. The grief is back, the mourning you thought you were over, the abandonment that haunted your nighttime musings, but as you fold into yourself, it's clear it never left you.

Your father repeats his question. You don’t have an answer for him.

* * *

You try to find a hobby. A distraction. Nothing sticks. Nothing holds your attention for long enough. Piano feels like a chore. Video games are distracting but unfulfilling. You pick up your old camera but each photo is uninspired and you feel like you should be trying to search for something other than sunsets and birds on fences. 

You flick through the older photos stored on the internal storage, only to find the dates between the saved pictures are long. Too long. Months in between each shot. Even the external storage seems barren. You have the vague memory of using the camera all the time for paranormal investigations or whatever, desperate to prove you were right. You wouldn’t have deleted them, would you?

You’ve been ignoring it, but there’s gaps in your memory, the same as these photos, and if you think about it too much, your head starts to hurt again. You worry, but that too worsens the migraine. The thought of telling your father makes you nauseous. You put the thought away, and stuff the camera back in your closet by the rubber pig that you'd also forgotten about.

Guess you were never into photography like you thought you were. At least that's what you tell yourself. It's easier than thinking about.

Your dad offers some extra curricular time in his labs. You accept, with nothing else to do and he is overjoyed. It becomes part of your routine, going to his lab and following him around, helping where you can, and learning the ins-and-outs of how he works. 

It’s not fun. It’s not even enjoyable in any aspect. It feels passionless, emotionless, as you measure various chemical compounds to your dad’s exact specification, as you bolt in machine parts according to his instructions, as you weld disparate pieces under his watchful eye. He couldn’t be happier with the ease you pick it all up. With each order fulfilled, with each meager offering of praise, you feel like you losing something of yourself. Like your becoming the experiment. Like your patching in new pieces that don't fit to yourself. 

At least you don't think while your working under your father. At least you don't have the headaches as you learn from him.

You take what you can get.

* * *

(You draw a little alien in the margins of your notebook. It’s small, insect-like with big eyes and antennae. You think it’d be green. Taking it in as your teacher drones on about algebra makes your gut knot. Looking at it makes you guilty. Looking at it makes your head hurt. It makes _you_ hurt.

You erase the little alien. Every time you read your notes, you have to stop yourself from picking up the pencil and re-tracing the faint outline.)

* * *

You’re 15 and your classmates largely ignore you now. Your grades are excellent. You have a few acquaintances who talk to you in class. You're a model student. There’s a rumor that you’re either gay or going to shoot up the school. Your dad fondly wonders when you’ll start bringing girls home and you haven’t told him that at least one of those rumors is true.

At least, you assume it is. Girls interest you not, as expected, but guys don’t really either. You’re 15 and horny all the damn time but it's like the thing you want, what you're looking for doesn't exist. Your fantasies at night in the shower are vague and unsatisfying, like grasping at the intangible and it leaves you tense. Men just seem to be the closest thing to whatever _that_ is. 

The first guy to show any interest in you is someone who just moved to your school, who doesn’t know your history, who didn’t listen to the first rumor, but laser focused on the second. He’s an awkward guy, a year older than you and in your Chemistry II class. You take a chance, give him some time, sneak him into your house when your dad is at the labs.

He asks why people say you’re weird. You tell him it’s because you were way into the supernatural for way too long. He asks what you’re into now. You look at your blank walls, your bookshelves lined with nothing but various scientific encyclopedias, and your barren floor. You don’t know how to answer that question. Not anymore. 

The fling lasts a generous two months, ending when the guy finally realizes you have nothing in common, and you personally can’t be bothered to give him more time outside of a make-out session when no one’s looking. You can’t relate to him, no matter how hard you strive, and you can’t even bring yourself to care that much. It was fun, distracting, but ultimately, meaningless.

Sometimes, you catch yourself staring into the night’s sky. You used to have a telescope, but it’s been missing for years. Instead, you sit on your roof and just watch. The pollution from the city masks most of the stars, but you know their locations and movements by heart, a product of a bygone era, of childish interests lost. You sit, uncomfortable both from the hard roof and the angle of your neck, silent and still. 

You’re searching for something, waiting for nothing. If you let your thoughts wander, unimpeded by your internship or school, free of distraction, that grief returns. It’s dulled now, leaves you alone, hopeless. There’s a distinct sense of being stranded, of being abandoned here on in this house, this neighborhood, this _world_. You aren’t supposed to still be here, but you are. It’s not logical; you have nowhere else to go and yet-

There’s an idle thought you catch at times as you watch the blinking of satellites overhead, adrift and passing the moon. A thought wondering if you’ll ever go back. It feels possible, somewhere, quietly whispering on the periphery of your mind. Some part of you is adamant it knows what space is like, what leaving Earth is like, what being free of this planet is like. It's a memory, not in your brain at least, but in your limbs, your muscles, the very fiber of your being.

But _you_ know you’ve never even come close to leaving the planet’s atmosphere. You would remember that. How would you be able to forget it.

Right?

You go inside, like always, afraid of yourself. You avoid looking out the window on those nights, those evenings you think you remember these things. If you pass by your father on your way to your room, you’ll find the window you usually clamber out of to the roof locked in some new baffling way that makes it harder to get out. It never really stops you, but you get the distinct impression it is supposed to. 

He conveniently doesn’t know what you’re talking about when you ask him about it. Sometimes, you wonder what he's not telling you. You always chalk it up to dad being dad in the end.

You spend most of your free time in the engineering lab, doing whatever your father’s assistants tell you. They are amicable to your presence, listening to what you have to say, making small talk, but you know it isn’t out of genuine interest for you as a person. You’re their boss’s kid, after all. Sucking up to the brat might get them in with the dad. 

It's the same with your acquaintances in class. They found out who your dad was, what that meant, and suddenly, they had words for you. You're a rich kid whose father is the world's most powerful scientist in nearly every field conceivable. You're useful to them. You'll never let them get close though.

You hate every last one of them for what they did to you, what they say about you, for trying to use you.

Membrane stops by the lab often, proudly boasting of your accomplishments to tight smiles and glossy stares and you take it with as much joy as you can, which to say is very little. He talks about your intelligence, about your accomplishments and every time you want to sink into the floor and disappear. Yet you standby, quiet, gaze down to the linoleum at your feet as the assistants politely listen.

There’s something in his pride that is insidious. Controlling. It disgusts you when he talks about you like this. You’re slimy afterwards, wrong in many ways. He shouldn’t be proud; he’s supposed to be disappointed. You’re not his prodigal son and you never have been. He’s pretending, he's _lying_ , he has to be.

But why would he be? You've been the perfect son for years now, doing nothing wrong and everything right. He should be proud, but there's a crushing weight to his hand on your shoulder that you shy away from, to the fondness in his voice that makes you squirm. It didn't use to be like this.

Membrane has never hurt you, but like being in space, some part of you is certain he has.

* * *

(“I miss you.” It’s whispered to your white ceiling as you can’t sleep one evening. You reach up, wanting to grab something, someone, but the room is empty, save for you. You don’t know why you say it, or who it’s for but it resonates shamefully true within you. It feels like a revelation, an admission, a confession of things you never said, of things you didn’t think you’d ever have to say.

Of things you’ll never get to say.)

* * *

You’re 16, and you’re afraid of sleeping. Not of what you dream, but that you don’t want to _not_ be dreaming. 

It feels right when you sleep. You feel like you, in ways you don’t feel anymore and it gnaws at you that one of these nights you’ll refuse to wake up because your brain is intact in the dream and in reality you are-

Broken. 

Cracked. 

There’s a schism, invisible to everyone but you and even you can barely see it, only _feel_ it. In your mind, in your memories, its present, looming, a sickening cold dread that tampers every step, every breath, every second with the constant drone of _this isn’t right-_

But. In sleep. It doesn’t exist. You’re whole, or at least some approximation of whole, one you remember, can remember. You want that, more than anything: to feel normal again. There was a time when you were, when you weren’t on a knife’s edge at all times, when you weren’t constantly looking for something, when you didn’t find yourself staring into the sky begging someone to come back.

Your headaches are getting worse. Sleep may bring peace for a while, but you often awaken to fits of migraine induced nausea and a pain so blinding, you can barely keep your eyes open. You want it to stop. You’d give anything for it to stop, but you can’t. 

And there's no one to help you. Not dad, not Gaz, not any of your dwindling acquaintances, not anyone. No one wants to. No one tries. No one even notices. You’re falling apart and not a single person seems to care. 

_There's someone who would. Someone has. They left you._

Who?

You’re achingly lonely and it's all collapsing around you at once, like you’ve been patching a dam for far too long for far too little and it’s finally broken beyond repair. Something is missing, has been missing for years even though you try to ignore it but you can’t ignore it anymore. 

You spend long nights shifting through your head, searching for anything that might clue you in to this emptiness that permeates every action, every emotion. There’s those gaps, however. Not the usual ones that come with the passing of time that feel natural as the brain shifts out unnecessary information. Instead it is entire months, almost a whole two years you try to recall, your brain tries to supply, but you find nothing but blackness and an answering sharp headache. 

It’s unnatural. Manufactured. It has to be.

It's the migraines that clue you in. Right there, in the frontal cortex, punishing you for trying to remember. You’ve brought them up to your father, but he always waves them away with the same excuses.

The weather. Lack of sleep considering what a teenager needs. Stress. 

“Nothing to worry about, my boy. Just take an ibuprofen and get some sleep tonight.” 

He’s lying. You know it. You _have_ known it for years, but this willful ignorance...

Pieces are falling into place as he reads his morning paper at the table. A rare morning for the household. 

You leave early. Say you’re going to school for some extra study time. If he can lie, so can you as you take a different turn to one of the labs dedicated to research on human anatomy. They’re dark at this time of day, only the most ambitious of scientists and assistants being in yet. You have a universal keycard, but instead you sneak in after a bleary eyed assistant who recognizes you and holds the door open.

It's a gut instinct, something you decide to follow on this day. Normal entry logs into the security system. A system you suspect your father keeps a close eye on. 

There’s a whole department for just neuroanatomy, and with no one in, you’re free to investigate as you please. The computers in here are connected to their own data server, and logging into them with someone's credentials left in an unlocked desk is the simplest thing in the world. It takes less than five minutes to find what your looking for in a long abandoned folder buried deep within the computer's library.

A collaboration with the psychology department on memory therapy. Retention and suppression. Suggested use on victims of trauma and Alzheimer's patients. Retention side was a failure, unable to truly aid the brain in memory recall but the suppression side…

Your heart might beat out of your chest. Is this it? You click ‘experiments-ongoing’. There’s no names. Only a sequence of identifying numbers, letters, and dates. You mouse over one with a shaking hand.. 

Redacted. 

You blink, but press on. Another. 

Redacted. 

A third. A fourth. A fifth. 

Redacted. Redacted. Fucking _redacted_. Lines of blacked out text, with nothing but the most mundane gibberish in between. You read through it, the anxiety that had strung you along now dropped and morphed into hopelessness with each one you search desperately for answers. Each pass over blacked rectangles and seemingly disjointed words has your heart sinking more and more. 

For a moment, you were so sure. So convinced you’d find it. Finally.

There’s nothing here for you. No answers. No memories. No direction for your fingers to point. You’re even more lost than before and you log off the computer with a sense of bitter incompletion. You’re empty, incomplete, and you don’t know why and as you turn to get out of the office chair, the door-

* * *

You’re 17 when you finish high school. Being sixteen was a blur, so much so you barely remember it, and you now have a diploma and nowhere you want to go in your life. You used to know, you think, but even after so much time being in the labs and excelling in your classes, you haven’t found it again. Your dad is proud of you, at least. 

You’re directionless as your final summer before college begins. You want to say it's new, but you know it isn’t. It’s bitter, a lingering taste that pervades every moment of your consciousness. You’ve been going through the motions without acknowledging them for too too long and life is moving you without you wanting it too. 

You want it to stop. 

Not in that way, not in the 'permanent solution to a temporary problem' kind of way. You’re too stubborn, arrogant to let this shitty ass world continue without you before you get even a modicum of comeuppance. That’s giving them, the people who ignore you, avoid you, hate you, giving them what they want; a place without Dib Membrane to sully their everyday with your awful existence. 

No, they don’t get to be so lucky. You can continue to be miserable and alive out of pure spite until you cement some way to get back at them, until they know why, undeniably why they hate you. Why they ignore you. Why they never even look at you.

You search for answers in ways most disaffected young adults do, in the ways you’re expected to. At the bottom of a bottle. In the arms of strangers. Under more influences than you can count. By the daylight, you’re the perfect lab intern, the perfect aspiring scientist. 

But come sundown and the freedom afforded by a chronically absent adult and too much time on your hands, you make new gaps in your memories. New nights to not remember. New days on end that come and go in a blur with no discernible features save for faint praise, handprints on your skin, and another hangover to chase away the evenings. 

You’re destroying yourself, sure, as summer bleeds into autumn, as you start the long road to a career or whatever the hell you’re dad has coerced you into, but at least you are controlling it. You’re making it happen, you’re forgetting on purpose, you’re the hand pushing your head underwater so you don’t have to feel-

The first two months of college are a wake-up call. The steady decline into failing the semester, the worsening work at the labs, the voice of inhibition steadily increasing in its volumes. You wake up one morning to find yourself in a hospital, your stomach having been pumped and Gaz sitting across from you. The bags under her eyes are more pronounced than ever as she doesn’t look up from her Game Slave.

You tell her you’re sorry. 

She tells you not to do it again.

You start to understand why you’re doing this as you lay there, waiting to be dismissed and struggling as your vocal cords spasm uncontrollably in your esophagus and you actively have to fight for breath. It becomes clearer as your own thoughts come into sharp focus in the low unintrusive noise of the hospital lulls you into a meditative state. A state you’ve been actively avoiding for months now, because then you can think, and when you think, you're in pain again. 

It's easier not being sober. Your head doesn’t hurt when you aren’t aware of it on your shoulders. There’s no one to remember when you can’t even remember yourself. 

* * *

(You don’t dream like you used to. Even coming off your bender, your unconscious is muted, mundane. Sleep becomes sleep again, and despite everything, it’s disconcerting to say the least. It feels guilty, like you’ve let go of something you shouldn’t have. You don’t mention it to the therapist you’ve started seeing. They wouldn’t get it anyways.

You try to find the old broken pig toy in your closet, but someone’s thrown it away. You don't know how to feel about that.)

* * *

You’re 18 when you meet him. 2nd year of college, in an elective you can’t be bothered to care about, he enters your life with as much speed and violence as a bullet to the back of your head.

The professor is introducing the class, the syllabus, the impossible sick policy, and the door to the lecture room is kicked in, bouncing deafeningly off the wall beside it. The professor stops as expected, and the half of the class that wasn’t brutally woken by the sound cast annoyed glances to the door where stands one ugly little man, sneering at the gathering. 

He demands everyone stop looking at him as the professor orders him to sit down. Despite your best efforts, he stalks to the chair next to you, even with the entire back row empty around you. He’s immediately in your space, commanding it as his knees shove yours out of the way in the cramped overfull seating arrangements. 

You don’t even know this person, but his insistence of being so close, his offended expression you would even dare to want some room for your legs when he had miles of seats to choose from farther away from you, just his very _being_ incenses you. You kick him, to your own surprise. He kicks back. You tell him to fuck off. He smirks, leans in, tells you to ‘make me’ in a low threatening way. 

You’re tossed out of the class for causing a scene, the guy following right at your heels as you step into the empty hallway. The door slams shut as you turn on him, embarrassed that you’re starting the semester this loudly, this abruptly, and you get in his face, grabbing the front of his jacket, demanding who the fuck he thinks he is. 

“Zim, idiot.” There’s a finger prodding you in the forehead, shoving you back as he marches past you, gleefully. “And don’t forget it, Dib-worm!” 

The retort curdles on your tongue as you watch him leave. The wind’s been knocked out of you for reasons you can’t explain, you’re angrier than you’ve ever been, your head is _throbbing_ , yet even among the pain and the humiliation, you are _elated._

* * *

There’s something familiar about him you can’t place. The weird way he talks, enunciating and declaring simple statements as if you and everyone else is too stupid and deaf to understand. The way he gestures, flails, in clear juxtaposition to his militaristic march of a walk and posture. The frankly inhuman expressions on his face and how he jerks and twitches in odd manners. His odd fashion that is neither pleasant nor fashionable, and is accentuated only by a plain metal band he keep around his forearm at all times.

He fascinates you in a primal sense; you want to study him, hurt him, _break_ him, know him in ways that are impossibly violent and burningly intimate. It frightens you how obsessive this need strikes you but you can’t stop it, can’t stop yourself from finding him again and again.

You two spend too much time together, arguing, angry, yet always seeking each other out like magnets too stubborn to be stopped by things like space and proper social etiquette. In class, outside of class, kicked out of class, in the meandering walkways on campus, at the city park, on the side of the street, you come together in a verbal spar that you pray becomes physical, and when it does, when fists start flying, you pray it becomes physical in a different way.

You hate him, immediately, viscerally, but not in the way you hate the others. Zim is a narcissist, prone to preening and bragging, constantly lying about the most surreal and ridiculous things. You can’t tell if he’s delusional or just that full of himself to think anyone would believe he’s been to space or fought fucking aliens or some other shit he’s spouting. You just want him to shut the fuck up. You want to punch him in his dumb mouth. 

Have punched him in his dumb mouth, right in the jaw, watched him flounder for a second before he tackled you to the ground in your shock, more that eager to prove he could back up that mouth of his. The bruise on your eye and neck raises some eyebrows at the lab; you don’t get in fights anymore, physically, preferring to be a dickhead with your words not your hands, but for Zim-

You can’t stop thinking about him. Something about Zim is sticky, gripping; you can’t get him out of your head. He could be doing something, saying something, just fucking breathing, and it drives you crazy when you aren’t around to tell him off for it. Every minute spent with him grates on your head, on your patience, yet every second apart is tripled in length, dragging on and on until you see his stupid smug face again. 

When you’re not next to him, arguing, bickering, fighting, the world is incorrect, upside down, tilted just enough for you to notice and to make you sick. Without, you’re adrift, lost, purposeless. Every action lacking motive, every emotion drained of reason. It worries you, disgusts you. You can’t focus at your internship even with your dad standing over your shoulder. It’s like everything’s been taken out of the world and you’re left quiveringly empty.

And then you see him again, and you’ve been doused in gasoline once more, lit aflame, burning inside and out. Its insanity, this ire, this loathing Zim plucks effortlessly deep within you that consumes every other emotion you could have leaving you as nothing more than a righteous ball of potential energy ready to burst the moment he opens his mouth.

How did you function before, without that burning intense hatred fueling every interaction, every facet of your thoughts? How did you accomplish anything without Zim being there for you to prove your better, smarter, superior?

How were you alive before you knew him?

* * *

(Zim talks about people like their cattle, like their collectively stupid and easily manipulated, like he isn't one of them, but even as you take the other side, you agree with him. You and the rest of humanity have never found common ground and it's a challenge to defend that but you fall into that position with a practiced ease. It’s painfully familiar to do so, nostalgic in a way you cannot grasp, and your head hurts if you mull on it too long. 

Without thinking one evening, laying in the park like two old friends who hadn’t just frightened off children by cussing each other out, you absentmindedly liken him to an alien, teasingly, jokingly, and he freezes mid-tirade. 

You give him a look as he stares at you with wide vulnerable eyes. You push yourself to your elbows and he fiddles with the metal band on his forearm. The word rings in your brain, echoing off your skull like it might embedded itself into the bone. It’s like you’ve done this before, been here before, said this before with him next to you like this, but that’s…

Impossible.

Your headache is back, worse than before.

Zim changes the subject. You think it's for the best.)

* * *

You’re 19 when you kiss him. You’re fighting again, physically, over something stupid, something he said that was vaguely insulting enough for you to grab him on that lonely hill overlooking the city at 2 in the morning. 

He’s got you pinned on your back, above you, smug, sneering, and you weasel an arm from under his grip to wrap around his neck and mash your mouths together. It's an action that is neither comfortable nor nice, and it could easily be classified as both an attack and a kiss but it feels _right_ either way. 

You’re burning in a way you haven’t before, legs tangling with his. He breaks away only to kiss you again, more demanding, fitting together better. How many have you had, more intimately, and they left you empty and yet this simple interaction leaves you desperate for more? Does he feel it too, this magnetism, this _need_ as you pull him closer, entangle yourselves better, move together- 

You must make a noise for Zim abruptly pulls away, stunned and panting just as you are. His ugly face is screwed up with expressions you can't read and he shoves himself off of you, sneer somewhere between disgust and terror.

"Don't-" He starts, standing swiftly as you try to get your legs under yourself. He falters, touching his mouth in wonder and you glare, silent and secretly proud. He stalks away without a word. 

You smile despite yourself as you touch your own buzzing lips. You’ve won some ground, but what exactly, you aim to find out.

* * *

Zim can't avoid you forever. He doesn't actually try, but he is more careful in the distance between you. Positioning, timing, his part in this dance you've created, hyper-vigilant to an absurd degree that is both amusing and irritating. You find fun in how easily he startles, how fast he is to work into stuttering cowering fluster. There’s power in it, control, and you relish in the idea of these small touches, these moments of closing proximity pushing him to a breaking point, pushing him to flip the script and move this physicality between you into a wholly different tango. 

It's a game now; how close can you get, how far will he let things go before scuttling off and admitting defeat with a turn of the shoulder and a shove. You relish every second, needling these weak points even as he stabs you back with words and phrases meant to keep you at bay, yet you both know it doesn’t. You know it just draws you closer. 

Forget college, forget other people, forget the forlorn disappointment of your father as you fail to show up to the labs again, _this_ is where you find meaning, where you find intrigue. You feel like you’re living two lives: one with Zim and one devoid of him and it’s not hard to see which you prefer, which makes you feel more.

It takes a while, months even, before Zim starts really playing along, and the rules change again. You thought you’d break down his barriers, push him to enact all you’ve teased him with tenfold, but he shocks you in redoubling your effort. Your pursuit mirrored back as you begin to dance around each other in the most elaborate of ways. 

It starts slow, a touch there, a breath here. His demeanor is guilty at first, as if he shouldn’t be doing this, as if there’s something else holding him back, but with each meeting, each day, each week, he gets bolder and you thrive on it. You still fight, you still yell, you still inflict violence on one another, but it feels natural. A progression from whatever you were before to now.

The violence is inherent to the eroticism, to the intimacy and you wonder how you could have had anyone else before him.

* * *

(You haven’t thought about those gaps in your memory in a while. Haven’t wanted to, haven’t needed to. You chalk it up to distraction, to a better mental state, to finding something that occupies your time in ways you don’t know if you’ve ever found before. You don’t feel cracked or incomplete anymore, at least not when you’re with him. Some might call that love. 

You know that’s bullshit.)

* * *

You’re 20 when you finally get it, when you finally understand.

It’s another night like any before: you and Zim are in your dorm room, yelling about something, the usual affair. Things get physical, but there’s a slant to it you’ve felt before, known before with other people. There’s a heat, a purpose to the way he fights with you, this time blatantly clear and you match him step for step. 

This time, finally, he initiates. He puts his mouth on yours, he slides his hands under your shirt, works you into a frenzy with his teeth and tongue. The hesitation from before is gone to desperation and when he finally gets his hand around you, you're certain you'll expire. 

It’s when you touch him back, he stops. He snatches your wrist, halting your hand from where it hung dangerously close to in between his legs. He throws you off him, to the floor. One look at his face is enough to shatter any resolve you had at letting this go again.

You ask him what’s wrong. You ask him what’s changed. You’re infuriated, embarrassed, _hurt_ in a way you didn’t think was possible. You’ve been rejected, but never like this. Never thought you could be by him. 

He tries to leave but you grab him round his forearm, right over the weird metal band he always wears. You make him look at you with his guilty eyes. He snarls, lying, about this not being what you want, that you don’t understand, can’t understand. 

“Your stupid beast brain doesn’t remember!” He snaps at you, trying to shove you off, trying pull his arm out of your grip.

He slips from you and, in turn, you pull off the band on his forearm.

* * *

_You’re 12, standing in that park, and an alien stands before you; a green alien with antennae and big eyes and his hand offered, outstretched in front of him. Waiting for you to take it._

_"The Dib is better than them."_

_You’re full of hate._

_“You know it, don’t you?”_

_But it’s not for the alien this time._

_“Filthy dirt-worms throwing away their best.”_

_You’re covered in bruises and worse._

_“They don’t know what they’ll be losing.”_

_But they’re not from the alien this time._

_“Zim can make them regret doing this to you.”_

_You reach out for his offered hand._

* * *

You’re 20 and you wake up in a sterile lab filled with equipment your father would drool over. You’re lying on an operating table, body numb and mind foggy, loose. You’re coming off of anesthesia, blinding by overhead lights and unsure of where you are. The room is alien, yet familiar, and, with the stabbing in your brain gone, that familiarity becomes clearer and clearer. 

Zim is sitting to the side of you, undisguised, clear as day, examining a chip pinched between two of his gloved fingers. The band on his arm is gone, replaced by a uniform you can remember with startling clarity. Your gut drops at the sight of him unmasked, casual, _here._ Memories begin to mash together, connections sparking violently, the rush of things forcibly hidden from you that send you vomiting over the other side of the table. 

Membrane knew. He knew all along. Knew Zim was an alien, knew the Earth was in danger, knew everything you told him was correct and infallible, but choose to denounce you, to gaslight you every step of the way. To let the people around you bully and harass you to the point of physicality in an effort to what?

Dissuade you from your real interests and toward what he wanted?

He had you bugged for months, had you followed after one of the times the world almost ended. Did he know you would get fed up? That eventually the indifference and hostility of humanity would send you careening into the arms of someone who sought to end it?

Did he know that your hate for Zim would one day pale in comparison for a hate of your own species?

And yet. 

And yet. 

He let it happen. Let it play out, left you to the wolves, watched as you spiralled further and further, only intervening when you finally crossed that line, when you were finally beyond repair. Where his solution was to cut out, no, to smother the bits he didn’t like and toss you back into the fray to see if you got it right this time. 

“Pitiful, weak human.” Zim sighs as you huff through the dry heaving that follows. 

“You left.” You gasp, age-old hurt drudging itself to the forefront, now with a name to its face. “Without me.” 

“I had to.”

You’re 20 when Zim is truly back in your life, when you finally understand what you’ve been missing, mourning. 

He stands up, different yet the same as he always has been. When he rounds the table to come to your side where you’re still hunched over, fighting off a panic as you process the deluge of information your brain is frantically trying to restore. Zim grabs your chin, asks what you want, gloved clawed tips pressing your jawline up to an uncomfortable angle so he can lord over you atop his mechanical legs in a way that makes you shiver.

“You.” You gurgle, swallowing hard at the remaining taste of bile at the back of your tongue. A confession, and fingers trace where the saliva makes your throat bob. 

He steps back, not far, just enough to offer a hand. The material of his glove shines tauntingly in the white, over-bright operating lights still pointed at the table. You eye it. He’s smug and it is both infuriating and feels like _home_. 

The grip of his fingers on yours even more so.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this was at least somewhat engaging and not completely confusing. Let me know how I did or what you think or if you have any questions. Thanks for reading.


End file.
